It’s nearly March already, and I haven’t even acknowledged the new year. I stopped smoking on Thanksgiving of 2016. I made a New Year’s resolution to remain a non-smoker. It’s been harder than I anticipated. The end of 2016 arrived and I was really doing fine. And then, after January 1, something happened.

Our heating oil tank had an issue with the whistle and some pipe thing. I don’t understand these things, but we knew about the problem because our oil company refused to drop off oil until the problem was fixed. That was last July. Harry said it would be really hard to do. He said it would take a long time. He said it would be expensive.

The first time he asked a question about the process at Home Depot, he discovered the project wasn’t nearly as terrible as he had thought it would be. But it was January. His plant is closing in August. Many people have already left for other employment. In January, he started having to work mandatory overtime. We had to use space heaters around the house, and I was none too happy to have to use so much electricity.

Last weekend Harry managed to finally get the pipes done. Now he has to call the oil company and arrange a time when he will be here to make certain there are no inside leaks. This could have been taken care of months ago.

Did I mention that Harry works third shift? He is only off on Sunday. I am seething. The one thing about which I am grateful is the warmer than usual winter. I don’t think the space heaters would have been sufficient had it not been that way.

The entire heating oil tank issue made me anxious right from the start in 2017. Now we have a delusional man in the White House who spouts lies and has no cognitive skills with which to evaluate any information which is set before him. Do you think I’ve been anxious? Yes, I have been.

I think this election hit me particularly hard because I was a conservative Christian for decades. I remember what it is like to take for granted what my church leaders tell me, and not think too hard about how some of it is obviously not correct At leat, not in a scientific way. I used to deny evolution’s veracity. I did not believe the facts of evolution taught to me at my junior college and I did not finish my associate’s degree because of my mental resistance.

Imagine how it feels to see the same lack of curiosity in our President. After it had taken me so many years to escape Christianity’s clutches, it grieved me to see Donald Trump mesmerize his followers with fanciful thinking. To me, Donald Trump was the ultimate Pied Piper, with a magic flute of untruths putting out a siren’s song of salvation. Evangelicals shocked me when they embraced him. Donald Trump’s entire life up to the point he ran for office in 2015, had been anything but what Evangelicals believed a godly life should look like. Donald Trump learned a few of the phrases of the Christian Right, and they all fell in behind him. They were so used to thinking magically, in an unproven and untestable deity, that they actually believed he is one of them. It was astounding.

It seems that if one is credulous in one area of life, that person is prone to being credulous about other things as well. (That’s a topic for another time.) I don’t know why I didn’t think it could get worse in the White House, but it did.

We are being led by a man who makes statements to the world based on watching Fox News or Infowars. It’s disheartening. Presenting him with facts–as most of us atheists have discovered when it comes to the very religious–only creates a backfire effect. “Fake news! Fake news!” he cries whenever he is fact checked.